A2 Media Evaluation

2. How effective is the combination of your main

product and ancillary texts?

Tia Campbell

The name of my local newspaper is called The Journal stylized as “thejournal” and the slogan of my newspaper is “Your personal paper”. The connotation of the journal is to suggest a sense of personal privacy, and personal belongings. A journal is a book people keep to write about specific events, secrets and deep thoughts, so by calling my product a journal it indicates a sense of personal possession to my readers/audience. The idea I wanted to achieve is that the newspaper would be a personal product to the audience, something personal to them that they can read. The slogan is the idea that consistently runs through all my product and ancillary tasks, so I think the combination is effective because the idea of thejournal being a personal paper is reinforced. The advantage of reinforcing the theme of a product creates a fun advertising and makes the product popular and recognizable to the audience.

Slogan (featured on the front page)

The combination of the newspaper masthead and the billboard are also effective through the use of consistent house style in colours. The colours used in my masthead are black and orange. The difference in design on the billboard where the word “personal” is stylized as the masthead on the newspaper normally would be. The effect of it being highlighted and designed in this way is to reinforce the theme of the journal being personal. The colours would also be recognised by the audience when they see the billboard. The font of the masthead and the word personal are also the same which triggers recognition.

Masthead design

Even though the billboard is simplistic with whitespace, the advantage of that is that the colours can be more noticeable and capture the audience’s attention. On the billboard the fact that “thejournal” does not have any design does not make the masthead less important, the attention has just been taken away from the name and placed onto the word “personal” to keep the theme consistent. The regular masthead is also in the corner of the billboard to show the readers which newspaper is being advertised if the design itself were not enough.

The journal as a local newspaper is “published” in Black Country (Wolverhampton). So the characters used in the radio advert would emphasise this idea through their accents. The character who shouts “Oi! Hands off my journal” is performed in a “common” accent to portray a working class man from the Black Country, which represents the region that the newspaper is published. In the literal script where it says “Hands off my journal” also echoes the theme of the newspaper being a personal product to readers, in the scenario someone has obviously taken the man’s’ journal and he reacts defensively taking possession of what he knows is rightfully his. The character also performs a tone of shock in his voice, to be surprised someone has even dared to touch his “personal” newspaper. At the end of the advert the slogan is also reinforced “The journal…Your personal paper”

Overall I think the combination of my product and ancillary tasks are effective because they continuously reinforce and continue the theme of the product by linking with each other with different features.

(Click link to be directed to radio ad extract: Oi! Hands off my journal)

http://snack.to/azu8wkcz